Of the estimated 1.5 million Americans who were diagnosed with cancer in 2009, 60 to 75 percent received radiation therapy for their disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.

For some patients like Bye, they were able to choose proton therapy over other traditional cancer treatments. That's because the ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City recently added breast cancer to the types of cancer it will treat with proton therapy.

But using proton therapy to treat breast cancer is not an agreed upon approach, and many doctors continue to debate what benefit the treatment provides patients.

Cancer returns

Bye thought she was done with breast cancer. She was fought cancer at 60, and after 10 years of no news about her cancer, she thought she was in the clear.

But in October, she felt a lump near her collarbone. A doctor's appointment and several tests later, she found out that she had cancer again in her lymph nodes on her right side.

“The main reason that I wanted to go through proton therapy was it saves other organs,” she said. “And when you're having treatment from your neck to your waist, you've got your lungs and your esophagus and your thyroid and all of those organs that could be affected, and with protons, (it) doesn't do that.”

Not everyone with breast cancer is a candidate for proton therapy.

Dr. Marcio Fagundes, a radiation oncologist at ProCure, said proton therapy is not meant as a replacement for cancer treatment for all patients.

Rather, ProCure has specific patients it will consider for proton therapy, including breast cancer patients with stage three breast cancer who have relatively large tumors in their breast, chest wall and lymph nodes.

Traditional radiation therapy has been used to treat cancers for a century using radioactive energy rays called “photons,” according to the American Cancer Society. Meanwhile, proton therapy is a type of radiation treatment that delivers radiation to tumors using tiny, subatomic particles, or protons, instead of photons, according to the organization.

With breast cancer, one of the main concerns is radiating the breast or chest wall might cause doctors to radiate the person's heart or lungs as well. This sometimes can cause heart disease and complications later in life.

Fagundes said with protons, this isn't the case. With traditional radiation, doctors cannot control how deep the radiation penetrates. But with protons, doctors can determine down to the millimeter where protons should stop, he said.

“Everybody agrees that protons have a tremendous advantage as far as sparing potentially critical tissues like the brain and the spinal cord, and we believe that similarly we can use protons to spare the heart,” he said.

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Jaclyn Cosgrove writes about health, public policy and medicine in Oklahoma, among other topics. She is an Oklahoma State University graduate. Jaclyn grew up in the southeast region of the state and enjoys writing about rural Oklahoma. She is...